What's black, squidgy and exhausting to walk on? The answer is peat, the gunk that gives malt whisky its smoky taste and burns sweetly when it's dried out. Dmitry Medvedev is busy just now, having cut short his holiday to deal with Russia's terrifying forest fires, but when he's done the president should think about his country's peat for a while.

Why? Because alongside dozens of forest fires, there are another 56 peat fires, many of them around Moscow, threatening Russia's most densely populated areas. Thanks to extraction and drainage, peat bogs in central Russia have over recent decades dried out, becoming a tinder-box threatening destruction and appalling air pollution. And while winter rains will douse forests, peat fires can burn underground, all winter long.

Not surprisingly, Russian officials are already looking at ways to make their peat wet again, like the project run successfully by Wetlands International in a national park in Moscow's neighbouring Vladimir region. It's a lot cheaper than sending in the fire brigade.

Fixing Russia's peat bogs will do us all a favour because even when it isn't burning, dried-out peat is a disaster. Clearing, draining and setting fire to peatlands for forestry and agriculture releases more than 3bn tons of carbon dioxide each year, equivalent to a gigantic 7% of global emissions from all fossil fuels. There's more carbon locked away in the world's bogs and mires than in all the trees put together.

Yet somehow peat remains the global environment's Cinderella. It hasn't caught the public's imagination in the same way rainforests have. In some countries with peat bogs there isn't even a word for the stuff. This has got to change.

Environment correspondents often say coal is the worst fossil fuel for releasing carbon into the atmosphere. Technically that's true, because neither the European Union or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognise peat as being a fossil fuel, even though under the right conditions it will turn into lignite.

In a cynical act of sophistry, Finland, one of a handful of countries that burns the stuff to generate electricity, calls peat "a slowly renewing biomass fuel". It sure is. A peat bog can take anywhere from a thousand to 5,000 years to regrow. And in the meantime, burning a ton of peat releases more CO2 into the atmosphere than a ton of coal.

Even more insane is draining tropical peatlands in southeast Asia to grow palm oil to turn into biofuel. Studies show this costs more carbon than it saves. Thankfully, the EU and the IPCC have finally woken up to this scandal, but both Indonesia and Malaysia plan to double their palm oil production, most of it on drained peatlands.

Aside from carbon capture and reduced fire risk, healthy peat bogs are great for biodiversity and absorb lots of water, reducing the threat of flooding downstream in heavy rainfall. My hometown of Sheffield suffered badly from floods in 2007, part of the reason there's so much focus on restoring peat moors in the Peak District through the Moors for the Future project.

Far from destroying what was once seen as wasteland, restoring damaged peat bogs offers an easy win in the fight against climate change. Wetlands International has funded the blocking of drainage canals in Indonesia, restoring water levels and reducing fire risk. Average costs of €1 a ton of CO2 make their approach far cheaper than carbon credit schemes. That's something for President Medvedev to think about as Russia faces up to the appalling cost of this summer's fires.

• The Guardian's environment editor John Vidal is judging a competition for communication of peatland issues as part of the IUCN UK peatland programme. To find out more visit the ComPEAT website